Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

The old man had received a barrage of sharp pieces of masonry in his lower back. These had been propelled like shrapnel through his intestines until they were hanging out of him. Louis’ shoes and protective mask had been blown right off him and now his eyes and mouth were open, all full of blood and dust. Jim tried to cry out but had swallowed too much dust (he’d lost his mask, too, and he guessed that his feet buried under rubble were probably bare). He flashed back on that vision he’d had as a youngster visiting Gettysburg, of gutshot soldiers and the smell of black shit. He wept, tears running very black on his face. He slipped his hands to the mess to try to put it back inside his friend.

  This is the landscape of the underworld, not hell, near hell…

  Somewhere. very distant, he thought he heard a waterfall. But it was just the roar in his ears from the collapsing catacombs.

  ««—»»

  The ancient faithful of the pagan god, Baal-Phegor, were trained to consume excrement. The Church (once upon a primitive time) mandated that ascetics be required to prove symbolic self-mortification by the act of pious coprophagy.

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 15

  SUBWAY TUNNELS, 1993

  The fat man blinked.

  She figured her language had caught him off-guard. Because she’d asked him, “You come down here to fuck me? See my drawings and think I’m some sort of freak whore using a subway wall as her calling card?”

  She repeated it.

  “No,” he said slowly, swallowing hard. “I am so sorry if I offended you. Actually one of my students told me about your art. So I came down to have a look. I’m a college professor.”

  Myrtle tilted her head, sizing up the older man. She could tell he didn’t have a hard-on. Most of the men who came down there looking for sick thrills had erections that told on them no matter what they said. And women who did the same stank of estrus, like animals in heat.

  “I’m the one who ought to be sorry,” she told him, biting her lip. “But try to understand, my life down here…”

  His forehead wrinkled and he sighed. “How long have you lived in this place?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t really know. Three years or forever.”

  He looked away, seeming to be listening to something.

  “That’s the rumble of the subways,” she explained.

  “Actually, I think I’m hearing a waterfall somewhere,” he said, his attention far away. Then he smiled. “Come out with me.”

  She shook her head, frowning, snorting. “Ah, that’s what I thought.”

  “No, I mean, let me give you a job. I could use a secretary. No strings. No touchy-feely crap. I’m always telling myself how much I want to help someone. Maybe this is my chance to put my money where my mouth is. I can’t just walk away and leave you. It isn’t…”

  She finished it for him. “Christian?”

  “No, it isn’t Christian.”

  Myrtle thought about it for a moment. “No strings?”

  She saw nothing of the hungry vagrants or the caroling rapists in his eyes. He wasn’t a horny tourist or a would-be sugar daddy.

  “No strings,” he told her.

  Somehow she believed him.

  And she did want to get out of there. Destiny in the underground could only go so far.

  — | — | —

  Chapter 16

  EGYPT,

  AT THE END OF DESERT STORM

  Corporal Jason Cave was in Cairo, ready to be entertained after the let-down of so-called battle, high on amphetamines he’d scored from a couple Navy pilots, his live wire grin burning in electrode dimples. He walked around at dusk, amazed that anyplace could smell so good and so bad at the same time. Cumin and unwashed sweat glands, ginger and heat-percolated toilets, sex acts live on stage with semen and piss stains everywhere, bellydancing boys in crotchless silk baggy trousers whose assholes were shiny with rose attar. At sunset the rounded tops of mosques gleamed golden breasts in the sky, turrets of scalloped erections bringing the rest into balanced perspective, singers crooning devotion to Allah as Jason went about his recreation.

  What a groaner this war had turned out to be! Nothing on the scale of the World Wars and Korea or even Vietnam. And over way too soon. He’d expected stimulation, kickass games. The practice of humanicide and all for a good cause. But mostly he’d just sat around on his butt, behind a computer in a tank. Only twice got to shoot at something and one of those had been a mistake, turning out to be another tank full of more Americans. (The term ruefully applied was Friendly Fire, but Jason hadn’t considered any of them to be his pals.)

  He saw many dead Iraqis, in twisted sprawls or burned in or around their gutted vehicles. He was ordered to help bury some of them in the sand—a duty many of the G.I.s hated, although Jason didn’t mind it. It gave him a chance to examine them closer. But, really, it wasn’t as if he’d never seen or smelled corpses. In the last few years he’d been exposed to quite a few. It’s just that those who’d perished in battle were different from the victims he’d known. The definition of active rather than passive being tacked onto demise…he’d been curious as he approached the battle dead: would there be a marked and proud alteration in expression (when there was a face left to hold an expression), an aroma of power in the blood (even if it had turned to blackened brittle), a certain je ne sais quoi of aura extant in the remains (even if scattered) which might point to one who’d been a Superman.

  Jason thought he’d found one, torso splattered to the four winds from having caught a minor rocket in his midsection. But the shoulders and head were there and that head smiled, more than the expected rictus. The eyes were starting to glaze but still blazed with a manic fury, that even at the moment of mostly physical incineration had told the world FUCK YOU! No birds had yet touched this one, to pick at flesh and pluck out orbs. No birds had dared.

  Jason had touched the third eye center of this forehead. He felt a rush of aggression and contempt. Someone who had been blown apart yet wasn’t vanquished, his head unbowed (even if almost all that remained). Jason received an image of him inside his mind, of the man whole again in an infernal paradise, working an assembly line of houri virgins, first deflowering them. Then proceeding to perform full infibulated pharaonics on each, excising the clitoris, labia minora, and most of the labia majora. He then handed them off to a female djinn to sew up the mutilated vaginas, leaving a tiny opening preserved with splinters of fragrant cedar. She took the scraps of sundered flesh and scooped them into a basket.

  This female djinn seemed to sense Jason watching. She glanced up at him, out toward the red clouds where he spied. Her face was very pale for someone from this part of the world but she had dark freckles as if she’d been splashed with an anisette. She was so beautiful he gasped and this was what brought him back to the desert and reality.

  He bent and kissed this third eye on the dead Iraqi, and whispered a quote from Aleister Crowley, “I yield him place: his ravening teeth Cling hard to her—he buries him Insane and furious in the sheath She opens for him—wide and dim My mouth is amorous beneath…”

  Another American soldier saw him and shook his head. Practically no one of Jason’s unit cared for him. He’d expected camaraderie, to find men of like spirits. But they were mostly mama’s boys, thinking their most exciting night was a case of beer in a sports bar and a blow job from a willing cheerleader.

  The single exception was a grunt named Michael Roheim, as big a man as Jason. Constantly in trouble, he was a violent man who believed himself to be on a mission from the angels. He might have been a Superman if he’d had more self-control. Jason alternately was amused by and disgusted with the guy.

  Someone once said that war was hell. Actually, it was a bore. He’d gotten a lot more action back home.

  He’d joined up looking for an hourly opportunity to blast somebody into the fourth dimenson. Races to see who could slaughter a hundred meaningless
enemy in a given time frame.

  Big Garth Listo had thrown him a party before Jason left for overseas. Vietnam had been Garth’s war.

  “I was younger than you,” he’d told Jason. “This will be a furthering of your education. I went to Tokyo before I was shipped home. You have stops to make, too. I know when you come back, that light will blaze from your open mouth. You have nothing to fear. You are The Beast.”

  Jason had nodded, but the Aleister Crowley step on his part of the incarnation wheel was over as far as he was concerned. It was nice to know. He’d needed it when he was growing up. But now it was time for Mach 2.

  “You’re not too old to come along, you know,” he said to his mentor.

  “I’ve become too Japanese,” Garth replied, gesturing down himself with a tinge of self-deprecation. “They’d never let me bring my swords.”

  “I have a gift for you,” Jason told him, bringing out a small box. “In case I don’t return, you know? Because I’m having too much fun to come home? Something to remember me by.”

  Garth was touched, smiling as he unwrapped the package and opened the box. Inside was a beautiful netsuke, a Japanese ornament—usually used as a button or other fastener—carved intricately from bone or ivory. This one was bone and Jason had strung it on a fine red silk cord. The figure was of a naked man sodomizing a naked woman whose head was a chrysanthemum blossom.

  “I saw that and she reminded me of sort of the ultimate bonsai project,” Jason admitted.

  “It’s gorgeous,” B.G. declared genuinely and put the cord around his neck. “I’ll always treasure this.”

  Big Garth had spoiled him on tales from Nanking and Saigon. Now Jason had gone through the Gulf War without a scratch, very disappointed in the hype of age-old traditions of butchery. He promised himself he’d have some fun. This trip just couldn’t be a total waste.

  He’d visited the usual sights: the Citadel, the Egyptian Museum, the 14th-Century madrasah of Sultan Hassan, a Coptic church in Misr al-Qadimah. He’d even gone to see the Pyramids—which, upon the magician’s first visit, Aleister Crowley hadn’t bothered to do, saying, “I wasn’t going to have forty centuries look down on me. Confound their impudence!”

  Jason even bought a copy of the Koran, a paperback of it anyway. He vowed to eat a page of it every day that he was there, to give him dreams of seventh heavens and battling infidels and demons. It made him a bit constipated—scriptures of any sort had that capacity, eh? But the local cuisine more than solved the problem.

  He’d even gone to Sahara City, south of the Gizah Pyramids, an open complex of nightclubs complete with Las Vegas style neon lights. Mostly watched bellydancers in spangles and tassles, drank a lot, tried unsuccessfully to score some hashish, and only barely avoided being arrested. Didn’t land even a single punch and saw no blood. Yawn!

  So that afternoon, he’d descended into the slum of Bulaq where he’d heard that there were as many as 300,000 people per square mile. He slipped a few bills to a man to tell him where the real shows were. Took the man’s cab in which a radio blared the voice of a muqri’, a Koranic reciter. It reminded him of the nasal evangelists belting out Bible lessons in America, gimme that ol’ time religion. (You hear that, Roheim?) Urchins climbed aboard the running boards and back bumper for a free ride, staring at him through the cab’s windows. Normally they flocked to the soldiers, chattering, offering matches or flowers or plastic combs for sale. But these kids wouldn’t speak to Jason, just ogled him as if not sure exactly what he might be.

  Cairo, from al-Qahirah. The oldest term for it was offered by the fellahin, the native stock, They called it Misr, Umm al-Dunyah: Mother of the World. Misr was an ancient Semitic word, meaning “big city.”

  The Mother of the World sprawled in mud brick and concrete, so hot it wisped the breath away, reached down to inscribe the lungs with its massive pollution, snaked in-between the legs to incite like a feather fan.

  The cab passed canals along the railroad tracks. Children were playing, splashing in the fetid muck only a few feet from water buffalo. There were goats, donkeys, sheep in the streets. A cart rolled by, laden with vegetables, its wheels six feet in diameter. A blind man tripped over an array of sugar cane cages in which chickens squawked. Reeking pools of water overflowed from sewers.

  At dusk Jason arrived at the bar. The driver spoke a few words to a guard at the door and Jason was admitted. He watched a woman, down on all fours but with her abdomen up, arching her slinky spine. The long rope of her coffee-colored hair, braided with silk cord, lay on the floor like a fakir’s cobra about to rear up for the fatal strike. A fat eunuch inserted a slender wire into his flaccid, nutless member and then wiggled this pop-up joke into her vagina. He shook up a bottle of fermented camel’s milk and let this spew into her to simulate his seed.

  Then she was fucked by a donkey, by an Ethiopian dwarf with a dick longer than he was tall, by the head of an asp, by a customer wielding a fish caught in the sea which she afterward fellated before he filleted it. Throughout all of this, her face betrayed no sense of presence.

  Jason was impressed by the mastering of her emotions. Not that he believed that all emotion could or should be reined in, or that everyone should have to control their passions. Fear and pain ought to be regulated by those who felt that such forebearance might please their masters. And, of course, Supermen like Jason were those masters, and the only discipline Supermen needed to know was what they themselves meted out.

  (What a shame the army didn’t see it that way. Hardly existentially-enlightened, the military. Made no sense to him, considering the lessons death could teach you. They offered you a chance to be all that you could be, but in the end all they did was teach you how to march in the procession of the damned.)

  He waited until the club shut for the night, wee hours of the morning. He hid across the street until the woman left. Then he followed her down past the closed booths of falafel vendors and aphrodisiac peddlers, narrow and mean like the edifices of outhouses, temples to nether gods, sepulchral with slime. They walked a long time, hours, eventually leaving the slum and entering an area of the city where modern construction gleamed lurid and monolithic in streetlights.

  He’d already visited innumerable places where raw sewage was everywhere. With the building of the Aswan High Dam, Cairo’s water table had risen a great deal, causing the city’s ancient drainage system to almost break under the stress. But this area of the city was more modern, designed for universities and museums and a higher class of tourists.

  The woman slowly marched past a new treatment plant. Water shimmered there in the dark as silent fountains before some medieval caliph’s palace. Moon and lamp lights floated in zigzag squiggles like some kind of sentient, luminous bacteria. The pumps hummed, grinding out the swill-mashers song as the modern part of the city’s offal was micronized and sanitized. The reflection from the pools played those miniature germinal thunderbolts across her voluptuous silhouette, as if these microbes were jumping out of the fetid impetigo to caress her.

  Could there be a goddess of toilets?

  More precisely, of waste?

  Of defecation and micturation?

  Feces and pee?

  It amused Jason to think so.

  But that was not this creature, who was paid nightly to be humiliated. Who was nowhere near anyone’s definition of a superwoman.

  Therefore, Jason—as a Superman—could take her.

  Could take her apart.

  (Upon that stage, looking into her face, he’d seen how dead her eyes were. He simply brought the rest of her up to speed.)

  And when he was finished doing that, the pieces of her floated in those pools, the mosque of her face up, eyes staring in much the same manner (no manic fury, no FUCK YOU!) as they had on that stage, being as Jason saw them last. The way she’d looked at him as he grabbed her. Turning toward him, so tired, almost stony as a pillar carved with cartouche out of the frozen past. Turning like a prayer wheel for someone caug
ht between worship and penance. Perhaps relieved it was over, she did not try to scream. Her undergarments were already full of blood and other secretions from the bar’s several unnatural acts.

  Jason quoted Kafka to her, although she spoke no English. (Which was all right, since Kafka hadn’t written it in English.)

  “A first sign of nascent knowledge is the desire for death.”

  The next night he followed another woman beside the Nile. Black smoke had started drifting that far, from the distant Kuwaiti oil fires which the Iraqis had set as a final, violent gesture before their ignominious retreat. The moon and stars were obscured. It made the sky smudged thicker even than was usual for Cairo’s smog of car exhaust, constantly blowing sand, and greasy vapors from the omnipresent food stalls. It turned it into an enormous cesspool, like the colostomy bag to a sphincter-cancer world. Definitely not the symbol of lovely Nut, Egyptian goddess of the sky, her body forming the vault of heaven as she bent to incenstuously embrace the earth, her brother Geb. According to ancient belief, they were only separated by Shu—the air’s embodiment, providing the universe its shape.

  (There was another story that told how Shu—and Tefnut, Shu’s sibling—were born. They were produced when the great god, Atum, masturbated. Cream of the crop.)

  The Nile churned, a black hole taffy-stretched into a light gobbling ribbon. The woman, dark matter. In the gloom, her bare feet left the tracks of a cat.

  And cats were animals who ate their own dung as they groomed themselves. Sacred, according to the old ways.

  Jason had seen this woman in the market, helping her family sell carpets to tourists—or in this case to the U.N.’s soldiers. The central mandalas were confounded with vortices, or were labyrinthine with adorned pathways concealing some Cloaca Maxima, the stench of which rose up as an elixer of peccant incenses. And always within sight of this squalor were the most fragile minarets, obelisks, steeples and turrets. People lived in cement boxes but within sight were carved domes, starting with simple ribbed patterns, going to fluent chevrons and then into flowered arabesques, intricate lace in limestone with interlocking stars.